by Giorgio Agamben
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The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy’s most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.
In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault’s fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle’s notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over “life” is implicit.
The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt’s idea of the sovereign’s status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective “naked life” of all individuals.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Interesting thesis, but..., 2008-10-19
Agaben has had quite some impact in the English speaking world, since publication of this book (along with Remnants of Auschwitz and the collection of essays Potentialities). Is the impact he has had warranted by his writings?
Well, one can see why his work appeals to some. The problem is that in this book and its companion, Remnants of Auschwitz, which is supposed to offer phenomenological support for the theoretical claims of Homo Sacer, Agamben fails to deliver.
As Phil Hutchinson points out in his Shame and Philosophy Agamben's theory rests upon on a flawed theory of meaning, whereby he gives an etymologically biased rendering of Derrida's notion of Deconstruction. Now, one can stay agnostic as to the merits or otherwise of Derrida (See Chapter Two of Hutchinson for a critique of Derrida) but Agamben's rendition of Deconstruction comes close to committing the genetic fallacy, by appealing to the genesis of concepts ("guilt" as originating in Roman jurisprudence is one example) so as to determine their meaning. Surely, even in Derrida's terms, this is problematic, simply replacing one philosophy of presence with another.
This book is difficult, and that gives it an air of profundity. Don't be misled. It is, I submit, not profound.
There is a live debate in analytic philosophy as to whether or not Derrida had anything of genuine originality and importance to say about meaning (see Section Five of Chapter Two of Hutchinson); however, even if one is inclined to argue that he did one would still have something of a task claiming that Agamben has anything of value to contribute to such debates. For, despite claiming to build upon Derrida's insights, Agamben seems to miss the point Derrida is trying to make. So, whether one is a Derridean or not, whether one is sympathetic to the project of Deconstruction or not, I think one will find this book ultimately deeply flawed. If you've read it and you don't find it so, please read Hutchinson's Shame and Philosophy and let us all now your thoughts then.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 "Homo Sacer" and the Problem with the Ancient Model, 2008-08-15
"Homo Sacer" proposes a succinct thesis: contemporary political regimes, including both liberal democracies and totalitarian governments, have increasingly relied on a juridical space that isolates and rules over the "bare life" (zoe) of their subjects. According to the author, the founding gesture of political sovereignty does not simply grant or restrict the rights of citizens, but wields an absolute power over the life and death of men. As the argument goes, today's biopolitical machinery betrays a hidden complicity with the most detestable forms of domination, exemplified by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Whilst many forms of contemporary sovereignty might seem benign compared to this singularly horrible event, these forms share with Nazism a tendency to expunge mediating political categories such as rights and contracts, and subject biological bodies to the immediate control of a sovereign.
Reviving a forgotten subject of ancient Roman law, Agamben defines the homo sacer (sacred man) as a political unit that can be killed but not sacrificed. Anybody can terminate the life of the sacred man with impunity, and no worth can be conferred upon his being through a ritualistic sacrifice. Although the sacred man is not actually deceased, he inhabits an indeterminate ground between life and death because homicide laws do not apply to him. He lives a virtual death. His "being-toward-death" is not only ontologically implicit but juridically authorized.
The figure that completes this grim picture is the sovereign, who may at any time call for a "state of exception." That is, he may suspend the laws of the land and thus produce a collective of sacred men who occupy a threshold between nature and civilization. Paradoxically, the sacred men are included in a new juridical sphere to the very degree that they are abandoned by the law. With this insight, Agamben subverts the conventional understanding of Hobbes' state of nature. The state of nature does not designate the status of men prior to the advent of political rule. Politics, rather, incorporates the state of nature into its very essence; the setting of Hobbes' "war of all against all" becomes the very terrain on which biopolitical authority is exercised. In Agamben's scheme, there is no chaotic life outside the scope of political sovereignty. On the contrary, sovereignty is sustained by this "zone of indistinction" between law and order on the one hand, and violence and chaos on the other.
Like his intellectual precursors Benjamin, Heidegger and Arendt, Agamben seeks to demonstrate the relevance of seemingly outmoded texts to contemporary political and cultural phenomena. Agamben persuasively illustrates the contemporary manifestation of one attribute of the sovereign/sacred man pair: the sovereign's capacity to kill without being punished and, correlatively, the sacred man's potential exposure to this injustice. I believe Agamben fails, however, to unfold the implications of the other aspect of homo sacer's being, that is, his inability to be sacrificed.
From a contemporary vantage, homo sacer's "unsacrificeable" character seems not simply irrelevant, but downright erroneous. The stringency of Agamben's ancient paradigm precludes an analysis of the insidious logic of sacrifice operative today. Because Agamben detects sacrifice exclusively within the boundaries of religious ceremony, he is unable to discern the manner in which secular political ideology both reinforces the sacrificeablity of the subject and renders him utterly disposable. Agamben tells us "that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, `as lice,' which is to say, as bare life. The dimension in which the extermination took place is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics." But this dichotomy--between the event of the collective sacrifice on the one hand and the banalized process of extermination on the other--is less stable than Agamben implies. "Sacrifice" functions as a convenient catchword by which the sovereign may, paradoxically, reduce the subject to bare life while recuperating a sense of purpose and meaning in the midst of mass slaughter. (Thus, Truman was able to write, "I think the sacrifice of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was urgent and necessary for the prospective welfare of both Japan and the Allies.") Within the scope of a dubious utilitarian calculus, sacrifice is deemed an investment for a "better future." In this sense, sacrificeability does not mitigate or contradict the sacred man's "capacity to be killed," but makes this capacity seem both palatable and redemptive. While we are beyond an epoch in which religious sacrifice is pervasively practiced, sacrifice is nonetheless transposed into a secular key and thereby used to justify a wide range of biopolitical crimes.
Although this may seem like a minor flaw in this text, it gestures toward Agamben's larger shortcoming, that is, his inability to buttress his most provocative claim: that we, today, collectively embody the ancient figure of homo sacer. His enumeration of contemporary states of exception toward the end of the book does little to remedy this problem. For instance, he squeezes "military interventions on humanitarian grounds" into his conceptual model of the state of exception not by demonstrating a structural coincidence between homo sacer and the subjects involved in contemporary warfare, but by making an unconvincing appeal to "an undecidability between politics and biology." Agamben is at his weakest when adducing such platitudes of deconstruction and passing them off as argument. While the reader cheers for his attempts to graft the structure of ancient Roman law onto the contemporary political landscape, these lines of thought run up against the same impasse, at which Agamben invariably resorts to specious analogical thinking.
Since I haven't read Agamben's entire oeuvre, I'm in no position to comment on the extent to which he has corrected this defect in subsequent publications. But in this book, at least, it is conspicuous. So, while "Homo Sacer" advances a strikingly original thesis, it leaves the reader wishing this critical point had been proven and not merely proclaimed.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
The Body = The Nation, 2006-12-13
I was first introduced to this text in one of my college courses. I'm not quite familiar with all of Agamben's theory on power, but I have read portions of, "The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern." This text I found to be weighty and at times difficult to read, but it sparked an interest in me to read more. I would like to contribute to the reviews with a simple interpretation of a few things that I read.
I'm intrigued with Agamben's idea of how society creates the category of the devalued through the category of the valued. An example of this categorical sorting is how the Nazis created this category of the devalued with the Jewish people, thus raising their own status of the valued. The Nazis were able to gain control/domination through the use of their concentration camps. By labeling others in society as lower than oneself, one can easily determine whether one's life is worth keeping around.
Another interesting point is how one's body/identity doesn't belong to that person, but rather the government and society owns that body. An example is of the creation of our American society, which came about through the killing of the Native Americans and bringing in of Slaves to further gain land and power. By controlling and taking over the body, the new America was created. It's fascinating to think of one's identity and body as one with the nation/government through citizenship, yet there are many examples within our own American society. America has taken citizenship away and than contradicted itself to ask the non-citizen to contribute to our causes (i.e. "war" or "economy"). An example of this control over citizenship is related to the Japanese-American internment camps during WWII. Once in these camps, Japanese-Americans' rights as a citizen were taken, than the government asked if they would fight for America. Thus the Japanese-Americans would have to prove themselves worthy of being a citizen/body of the United States of America.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 Homo Sacer is a must read., 2006-06-06
Agamben's best known work lives up to the hype. One of the most powerful aspects of this book is its shocking predictions about the world to come. Published many years before the initiation of the war on terror, Agamben signals the beginning the of a style of governance built on permanent exception. He insists that the extermination of the Jewx by the Nazis was not simply a horrible enigma that should never return, rather biopolitical atrocities have continued to intensify. This book is a must read for any person interested in understanding how the deep seated structure of sovereignty and its spatio-temporal course through power relations have brought us to the seeming limit poit of exception become rule. A handbook for contemporary politics. This is a great book.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
Political Ontology and Bio-Politics, 2005-11-29
Agamben begins his inquiry into sovereignty in the light of the problematic left to contemporary political ontology via Hobbes, Schmitt, and up to Heidegger (Dasein being that being who's very being is always at stake for that being, and ontological difference), post Heideggerian political thought (Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Derrida) and finally Foucault's bio-politics. While Agamben's criticisms of these thinkers is brief (and somewhat reductive) it does serve the importance of situating his own conception of bio-politics, sovereignty and life as a radicalized "state of exception".
The Logic of Sovereignty is not one of a mere inclusion of beings into a political sphere or form of life specific to it (bios) which emerges or is transformed from an originary bare life (zoe). Rather Sovereignty establishes itself as "sacred" or "set apart" from the polis. There is nothing legal about law, in that the very founding moment of political ontology is apolitical and extra-juridical (because there is no normative law that has been set up yet). Benjamin distinguishes between two forms of violence (constituting and constituted). However, while the Sovereign constituting power of law must claim to be wholly outside the law in order to have created it, it must also regulate and constitute its power through law itself, thus including itself within the law. The Paradox of Sovereignty then is that its life is an "inclusion through exclusion". The signifier of law is absent (or non-signifying form) but is signified through this very non-signification of absence.
Homo Sacer then is the non-criminal criminal , the "extra-juridical" exception that is designated by the sovereign. The homo sacer can be legally killed by any person but is not a juridical killing. That is to say, killing the sacred human is not homicide nor is it sacrifice. The norm of political subjects are set against the exception of the homo sacer, but also included in the norm in its very opposition and ability to exile homo sacer. Agamben sees homo sacer and the sovereign to have this very inclusion by exception in common. Both the Sovereign and homo sacer can be killed but not sacrificed. (It is not a legal issue to kill a King but rather a heretical or anti-juridical one in this account). The Werewolf (half man and wolf inside the city and outside of it, man and animal, political and non-political) and the Sovereign, the inside and outside become an "indistinction" which no longer holds up for modern politics.
The Camp is the modern political space or "coming to light" of this "indistinction" between nature and law in the form of bio-politics. Modern politics as bio-politics takes life as what is at stake for its own life. Bare life as the state of exception, or the sacred, now becomes the rule. As for homo sacer everyone was sovereign, for the sovereign everyone is homo sacer. "The Enemy" as constitutive outside to the norm of civil society now becomes the inside in a society as war carried out by other means (politics). Society as life itself is the `enemy outside which is inside'. In fact, it was the rule from the inception of western politics. The camp then refers to the Nazi bio-political movement where law and fact are indistigusihable. The "suspension of law" and "states of emergency" are not purely juridical, and the holocaust cannot be understood in terms of law alone, but can only be understood as the indefinite suspension necessary for sovereign power to kill without crime, and without sacrifice.
One of the strengths of Homo Sacer is that it is able to weave the problems of political ontology together with the historico-political configurations and aporias of Nazism/mythology/capitalism/ and statism. In a subtle way Agamben is challenging the whole of contemporary political ontology to begin to rethink politics in terms of (actual)potentiality: (Life). Bio-politics as the state of exception (as rule) is no longer oriented toward the impossibility of the law (as form of the law without signification) but is rather concerned with the form-of-life (as indistinction/exception). A political ontology that is not concerned with the impossibility of laying claim to bare life as such, or the fascist mobilization of its totality and implementation, but rather with the practical creation and proliferation of non-statist, non-hierarchical experimentations in political practices that would create new ways of living and maximize the diversity of lives that would decide these ways. Life as potentiality (never reducible to any given definition or determination (totalitarianism) always calls for the emergence of a new politics of the actual, pointing always to the inexustablity/infinity of Life itself.
Critique of Agamben's somewhat reductive (although appropriate) critique of Heidigger, Battaille, Nancy, Derrida etc. aside for a moment, what remains a gapping hole in this work is the complete lack of eco-critical perspective on life. Almost every time Agamben speaks of life it is always in terms of a human life (a human political refugee, a proletariat, the life of a human political body, or a human sovereign king or people). It is his call for the creation of a people (resonances with Deleuze here) that he seems to close up his work on life. His very inquiry into the `open' of Bare Life (potentiality) as always political (indistinction) is closed up through the work in his neglect of animal, plant, and non-organic life, and hierarchical (statist?) (almost humanist) privileging of the bios politicos of the human.
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